The Theatre: Third Jeeter

The rôle of Jeeter Lester, the ragged, flea-bitten patriarch of Tobacco Road, is beginning to take on some of the qualities of Hamlet. A great number of actors want to play it, and, by last week, three already had.

A year ago last week marked the Manhattan opening of the play about a poor-white-trash family listlessly starving to death in the country back of Augusta, Ga. It took some weeks before the theatregoing public began to perceive in Tobacco Road not a picture of stupid depravity, but an uproarious comedy of destruction. Henry Hull won critical salutes from all sides with his rickety impersonation of Jeeter. After he had played 30 weeks in the part, Universal snatched him off to Hollywood. Then James Barton, a song-&-dance man making his first legitimate appearance, took over the rôle (TIME, July 2). After 22 weeks, Hollywood bagged him too, with a contract from RKO. On the night of its 437th performance James Bell (The Last Mile) last week stepped into the lead of a play that. by now, has become a national institution.

As they might sit in judgment on a new Hamlet, critics trooped back to the Forrest Theatre to see the new Jeeter. Consensus was thatwhereas Barton had brightened up Hull’s dour Jeeter, Bell’s was even brighter still. In the matter of costume, Hull and Barton were about equally ragged and filthy. Bell’s hat seemed a little less greasy, his dungarees a little less torn. He did not spit so emphatically as Hull, nor could he manipulate Jeeter’s rheumatic legs so convincingly as Barton. In Bell’s hands what Jeeter lost in wickedness, he madeup in pathos.

“He looks like Mr. Barton looking like Mr. Hull,” reported Robert Garland for the World-Telegram, “but he wouldn’t leave Grandma Lester lying dead out in the field. He’d bury her.” Comparisons noted, critics agreed that Jeeter was still being capably performed, predicted that Tobacco Road, with a year’s impetus behind it, was well on its way to setting another Abie’s Irish Rose endurance record.